Since the age of Reagan, the foreign policy debate swirls has several flavors (the taxonomy is inexact):
* world government dreamers a/k/a the “international law exists,” nation-states don’t so multilateralism’s better crowd;
* pacifists, “power corrupts,” pro chaos anarchists, and “all-we-are-saying-is-give-peace-a-chance” infants;
* bigots;
* team “gloom and doom,” alias “European Union;” and
* pure-and-simple anti-Americans.
Krauthammer is a big brain, as even adversaries such as Francis Fukuyama concede, and he’s covered all those bases. His most interesting contribution stands on the shoulders of giants, particularly the “American exceptionalism” school praised here before. But he’s best known for two essays a decade apart articulating an American “unipolarity”:
No Oil For Pacifists is a must read for digging into hard questions on policy, values upon the Right and Left…where we’ve come from and insight on where we are heading…
and deals with the moral logic:
“Krauthammer returned to morals as well:
A large segment of American opinion doubts the legitimacy of unilateral American action but accepts quite readily actions undertaken by the “world community” acting in concert. Why it should matter to Americans that their actions get a Security Council nod from, say, Deng Xiaoping and the butchers of Tiananmen Square is beyond me. . .
This logic is deeply puzzling. How exactly does the Security Council confer moral authority on American action? The Security Council is a committee of great powers, heirs to the victors in the Second World War. They manage the world in their own interest. The Security Council is, on the very rare occasions when it actually works, realpolitik by committee. But by what logic is it a repository of international morality? How does the approval of France and Russia, acting clearly and rationally in pursuit of their own interests in Iraq (largely oil and investment), confer legitimacy on an invasion? . . .”
You may not agree with Carl but you owe it to yourself, and your country, to review his post.